The First Postmodern Presidency

The office Bill Clinton has assumed is smaller than it has ever before
been in the modern era

by Steven Stark

Everyone agrees that Bill Clinton faces Herculean tasks in trying to
reduce the deficit and improve the nation's health-care system. According
to several prominent presidential scholars and corporate theorists,
however, the toughest job of all for Clinton--and the one that could
determine to what degree his term is a success--will be to redefine the
very office of the presidency. Because of the end of the Cold War and
recent changes in mass communication, the role Clinton assumes in the
government and culture is far different from that played by Franklin
Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, or even Ronald Reagan. Though politicians, the
media, and the public continue to treat the presidency as the cynosure of
American life, in important ways Clinton has inherited a diminished
office.

Abroad, the President's role as a foreign-policy leader has receded. From
the end of the Second World War until roughly the middle of the Bush
presidency, the threat of communism and nuclear war created a sense of
continuing crisis, fueling demand for a strong presidency. Just as other
wars led to increases in executive power throughout our history, so did
the Cold War.

Moreover, because foreign policy is the one area in which a President can
act with relatively little interference from Congress and the press, chief
executives have tended to be absorbed by it. Even Jimmy Carter, a
candidate elected without much of an international agenda, found himself
spending an increasing amount of his presidency on foreign-policy issues,
where it was easier to get things done. This ease of action in foreign
affairs was aided by the fact that the Cold War coincided with a period of
almost total American dominance of the international scene. Since Franklin
Roosevelt's third term our Presidents have been primarily foreign-policy
Presidents.

Those days are now fading. The world may still be a dangerous place, and
foreign policy remains a presidential dominion. But if the end of the Cold
War did nothing else, it reduced the public's fear of nuclear annihilation
and thus its interest in foreign policy. The recent presidential campaign
was the first since 1936 in which foreign-policy issues played virtually
no role. What's more, the President's ability to shape the world has been
greatly curtailed by the rise of the global economy. Richard Rose, a
presidential scholar at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland,
describes a postmodern chief executive as one who, among other things, not
only can no longer dominate the world but also finds that what happens
abroad, in trade or monetary policy, often dictates what happens in the
United States. As Rose puts it in his book The Postmodern President
(1988), Presidents used to face stalemate and interference only at home.
Now, as part of a so-called new world order, they can look forward to them
abroad as well.

At the same time that these shifts have occurred, Presidents have learned
dramatic new ways of using their office as a bully pulpit. Since the
Administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Presidents have
increasingly used the media to "go over the heads" of Congress on domestic
matters, creating a cult of presidential personality and power--a
"rhetorical presidency," in the words of the presidential scholar Jeffrey
Tulis. In The Decline of American Political Parties (1990), Martin
Wattenberg documents how the role of political parties has diminished in
the past few decades, in large part because Presidents and other
politicians have learned to communicate directly with voters through the
mass media. Candidates increasingly run campaigns stressing their personal
qualities rather than their party ties. That development inevitably has
given the President increased visibility as the most powerful individual
on the national scene.

Meanwhile, the rise of national mass media--first network radio and then
three-network television--has allowed the President to speak in unmediated
fashion to virtually the whole nation at once. Many recent presidential
scholars have been writing about a similar phenomenon, as Samuel Kernell's
"going public" and Theodore Lowi's "the personal president" together
suggest: from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan the
history of the past sixty years has often been the story of how Presidents
used the mass media to become our prime political movers, appropriating
roles once held by Congress or the parties.

That era may be drawing to a close. The ability of a President to draw the
mass audience that broadcasting once afforded has been dramatically
diminished by the rise of cable television. The political conventions draw
roughly two thirds of the audience they did twelve years ago: many
Presidential news conferences are no longer covered by the three major
networks. As Samuel Kernell has documented, when the major networks do
cover a presidential appearance it tends to get lower ratings than in the
past because of cable competition. Sixty percent or more of all households
with television watched the first televised addresses of Presidents Nixon,
Carter, and Reagan, in the days before cable's ascendancy. George Bush
never even broke 40 percent except with one speech--during the Gulf War.
In this environment it becomes far more difficult for a President to
mobilize the nation. The once all-powerful national megaphone of the
presidency competes with many amplified voices in a diverse, atomized
culture.

So what's Bill Clinton to do? One idea Clinton seems likely to pursue, as
he did in the campaign, is that of a cable-TV-style marketing strategy.
Instead of appearing ten or fifteen times a year on prime-time network
television, where he would give a traditional formal speech or hold a
press conference, Clinton may well appear far more often in a variety of
different forums before smaller audiences--on the morning shows, C-SPAN,
local television, talk radio, and even MTV. Marketers have found that
generic mass-market advertising no longer works as effectively as targeted
communication--so President Clinton would deliver his message, to borrow a
phrase from his predecessor, as a thousand points of light. Occasional
Clinton advisers such as Doug Ross, the former Michigan secretary of
commerce and David Osborne, a co-author of Reinventing Government, spent
time between Election Day and the Inauguration designing a
presidential communication strategy that, if adopted, could eventually
include extensive use of such direct-marketing expedients as video and
audio cassettes, direct mail, and 800 numbers.

Ross sees this "direct relationship" as the key part of a broader effort
to redefine the presidency. "If Clinton acts like just another FDR or
JFK," Ross says, "he will at best end up making only marginal improvements
that are unable to transport America successfully into the future."
Describing Clinton's new mission, Ross cites not the scholars whom
Presidents have often sought out in the past but popular business
theorists, such as Max De Pree, the author of two highly impressionistic
books on corporate leadership, Leadership Jam and Leadership is an Art,
and the management guru Tom Peters. According to Ross, the world has
entered an era of decentralization, in which large bureaucracies--whether
General Motors or the federal government--are increasingly incapable of
dealing in broad, programmatic ways with individual customer or
constituent demands. Ross describes, in almost evangelical terms, a "new
paradigm"--as applicable to Clinton as it is to CEOs--in which consumers
and voters are looking to leaders to provide them with "broad visions and
values rather than top-down commands and elaborate rule books." Borrowing
a metaphor from De Pree, Ross says that a President is no longer like an
autocratic symphony conductor, leading everyone together. Instead, he's
more like a jazz musician, setting the tempo for each player to do his own
thing. Evidently there was more to that picture of Clinton the saxophone
player than met the eye.

For example, Ross foresees that Clinton might announce a new initiative
dealing with educational standards after holding a public meeting with
education experts, much like the December economic summit in Little Rock.
Or he might give a speech to discuss the issue, using videotapes to
provide viewers with a clear picture of the problem. Interested voters
would be encouraged to respond to questionnaires; they might then be put
on a list to receive an audio tape or a series of mailings, or to attend a
town meeting. Afterward the Secretary of Education might announce a series
of pilot projects to test new ideas. The eventual goal, Ross says, would
be to provide local school districts with good information that they could
apply individually, consistent with a national approach. It's a vision of
customer-driven government which appears strangely similar to Ross Perot's
concept of an electronic town hall.

Related ideas have been outlined by other corporate theorists, among them
Peter Block, the author of The Empowered Manager (1987). "There's a new
model for corporate leadership now," Block says. "The whole patriarchal
concept of a charismatic leader to whose authority you submit so he will
take care of you is disappearing, in favor of a model in which partnership
and service are dominant ideas." If Clinton can redefine the presidency to
be more consistent with that model, Block says, he won't have to worry
much about his TV ratings. "You don't turn up the volume in response to
the new age," he says. "You change the station."

If this all sounds a bit ethereal and imbued with New Age spirituality, it
is. Moreover, even if the goals of advisers like Ross and Osborne can be
reduced to a blueprint, enormous problems would arise in trying to
implement such a vision of the presidency in other than peripheral ways.
Using an innovative communication strategy to deal with a few creative
aspects of education policy is one thing; using the same method to come up
with defense or trade proposals is quite another. Some question the
relevance of "CEO models" to the presidency at all--with respect to
communication or anything else. A CEO typically has the power to move
workers around and even lay them off; a President has very little control
over the federal work force. "What's the incentive for anyone who's not on
the White House staff to do anything?" asks James Pinkerton, who was a
counselor to President Bush and was known for trying to get his boss to
think about the "new paradigm." Jeffrey Tulis, the acting chair of the
Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, sees
another problem. "Political leadership and business leadership are not the
same," he says. "In business, the bottom line is money. In politics, the
whole point is to figure out what the bottom line even
is." In other words, without an initial firm agreement on the chord
changes, the jazz is likely to turn into nothing more than loud noise.

Others find fault with a model that has the President continually on the
road, or running from studio to studio. Sixteen years ago Jimmy Carter
developed a communication strategy similar to the one proposed for
Clinton, albeit on a smaller scale, when he scheduled town meetings in
distant places and joined Walter Cronkite in order to take questions by
phone. This approach hardly helped him. Moreover, for a President--as for
any public figure--there is a danger of overexposure. "If the Carter
administration were a television show," Russell Baker wrote in December of
1977, "it would have been cancelled months ago." Franklin Roosevelt never
averaged more than two Fireside Chats a year until the war. In contrast,
even Bush--who was hardly known for a concerted communication
strategy--made fifty-six television appearances of various sorts during
his first nineteen months in office.

Tulis is one of several presidential scholars who maintain that what
Clinton needs to do with the presidency is something quite different from
running a perpetual campaign, as he apparently intends to do.
"Teledemocracy has weakened the presidency," Tulis says. "A President
needs some distance from the people to reflect, to slow down passionate
ideas, and to protect minority rights against the tyranny of the
majority." If Presidents have often been more successful in the
international arena than in the domestic one, he says, it is because the
conduct of foreign policy doesn't lend itself to public campaigning.

Theodore Lowi, a professor of government at Cornell, says that Presidents
inevitably create other problems for themselves when they establish a
close relationship with the electorate by means of television. Such a
"personal presidency" helps to set expectations so high that they cannot
but be dashed when the President and the public find, inevitably, that the
chief executive's powers to change the nation's domestic life are limited.
"As visibility goes up," Lowi says, "so do expectations and vulnerability.
There's more of a chance to make really big mistakes. It's a treadmill to
oblivion. It's why modern history is filled with so many failed
presidencies."

For that reason Lowi recommends that Clinton try to avoid a personal
presidency. With the rise of "narrowcasting" and a diminishing media role
for the President, Lowi sees a historic opportunity for Clinton to reduce
the heroic expectations that have encumbered the office. He thinks that
Clinton should reduce his visibility and resist efforts to accumulate
presidential influence--getting rid of regulatory reforms that increase
executive power and vetoing bills that impose conditions he can't meet.

Lowi's views have a correlate in the private sector. Many CEOs have
successfully reformed their businesses by decentralizing power, giving far
more authority and visibility to people who are closer to customers. The
problem is that a CEO disperses power to other employees in his
organization, whereas a President who gives up power along the lines Lowi
suggests often gives it to another branch of government, Congress, which
is considered more a competitor than part of the team.

Another problem, of course, is that Clinton probably didn't spend his life
planning a run for the presidency so that he could diminish its
importance. In the popular mind, and most likely in Clinton's own, the
great Presidents were the strong and visible ones who accumulated
power--the Abraham Lincolns, not the Calvin Coolidges. And in the end
there is only so much that Clinton himself can do, even if he were to
agree with Lowi and like-minded scholars. News coverage revolves around
strong personas: in the Weltanschauung of the Washington press corps, the
President must be the focus of events. The press would likely rebel
against any moves that dictated otherwise. Moreover, if the rise of the
Cold War and the age of broadcasting contributed to the growth of the
executive branch, they were hardly the only factors. The rise of the
regulatory and social-welfare state which began in the Roosevelt
Administration has played a major role too.

Still, the presidency seems headed toward a different role in American
life, though it may take years for that progress to be affected and
assessed. Horace W. Busby, once an aide to Lyndon Johnson and now the
publisher of a Washington newsletter, foresees an era in which the
President will be a kind of "governor of the fifty states." "The President
will become more of an irrelevancy," he says. "The old image of the
powerful President wasn't due only to the Cold War. It was the product of
a more primitive era. People today have far more education and exposure to
the outside world. They don't need to attach that importance and
responsibility to the office anymore." Indeed, in the new age of
fragmentation, when it's tougher to assemble a mass following, virtually
all colossal entities and authority figures of the old age have seen their
prestige and power recede. There are no centers of the universe anymore:
if Dan Rather is no Walter Cronkite, and Jay Leno is no Johnny Carson,
it's not necessarily because the people got smaller; it's because,
metaphorically speaking, the pictures did too. It's no coincidence that
George Bush was no Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton is no Jack Kennedy.
Their successors won't be either.